A VILLAGE LIFE
By Louise Glück
72 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23
"Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/bo...w/Logan-t.html ---
The Drowned Children
You see, they have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.
But death must come to them differently,
so close to the beginning.
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.
And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond: ...{excerpt}
Last edited by quasimodo1; 09-08-2010 at 11:29 AM. Reason: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179757
"It’s surely time to give up the Heaney/Muldoon analogizing. These are men whose poems — in terms of texture and structure, tactics and tone — could not be more dissimilar. But here they are, each with new books, issued within a two-week span by the same publisher. What’s a wide-awake couch potato to do but read them side by jowl? If there’s a better way to spend $50 in a bookstore this weekend, I don't know what it is." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- HUMAN CHAIN
By Seamus Heaney
85 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. {another review... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/bo...ooksupdateema3 }
.MAGGOT
By Paul Muldoon
134 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
Last edited by quasimodo1; 09-24-2010 at 02:47 PM.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082704859.html --- By Courtney Cook
Saturday, August 28, 2010
PHANTOM NOISE
By Brian Turner
Alice James.
93 pp. $16.95
Deluge by Tamás Emod
translated from the Hungarian by Thomas Ország-Land (October 2010)
Tamás Emod 1888-1938: Hungarian poet, playwright and theatre director.
I. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Beneath a rig of groans, in a tempest of tears,
engulfed by fear as an awesome deluge recurs,
on board a lost and battered, rudderless galley
afloat on the blood of this dreadful time of folly --
like sailors who trust their news to a bottle in the current,
I thrust these final verses into the torrent
so that, beyond death and terror and darkness, you
may still receive them one day in a better future,
you, in whom we have placed our faith and hopes
in vain, for we shall never reach your shores:
free shores, our home ever since the centaurs’ idylls,
cultured Europe, our ancient, classical cradle.
***
We signal our final farewells before the night covers us,
our helpless pleas of distress flashed over the flood,
and still salute the offspring of tomorrow,
we the galley slaves of the present, the ship and the oars
whose festive garlands have been torn away,
we sad and sensitive souls of this brutal age
who have foretold the worst and seen it all
who had screamed out in fear before we fell,
the children lusting for wisdom, humour and trust
before the depth of hell roared over us:
before our plight sinks into blind oblivion,
I send you these lines, the final news of our lives. ...
{excerpt}
Last edited by quasimodo1; 10-03-2010 at 04:24 PM. Reason: http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/73101/sec_id/73101
Tribute and Farewell (a review)
By Abigail Deutsch
NOX By Anne Carson
New Directions, 2010
--- { http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/nox-carson/ }
Poetry Festival, Newark, NJ -- Urban Beat for Poetry Festival By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: October 5, 2010 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/bo..._r=1&ref=books -- "The truth of that statement will be put to the test by an expected audience of about 20,000 poetry lovers at the festival, which is held every two years. They will interact with dozens of the most celebrated poets in the world, appearing in a lineup that this year includes Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, Mark Strand, Mr. Baraka, Martin Espada, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell." Felicia R. Lee, NYT
THE SMALL ROOM
The men with the same face are talking all at once,
One is a theorist, another is a theorist,
The rest are all theorists.
Behind the unsealed door a masked man listens –
The sophist with club in hand,
He too is a theorist. And somewhat drunk.
What name shall I give the deaf man
Who closes his eyes and places
His fingers in his ears –
Neither wise nor foolish,
Perhaps intelligent.
He faces the outward view of the same
Street which the blind man, beneath
The balcony, has discovered and rediscovered
Over the years with his hand over his mouth.
And eyes bursting open.
{Togara Muzanenhamo, from Spirit Brides}
Last edited by quasimodo1; 10-09-2010 at 03:16 PM. Reason: http://almostisland.com/poetry/TOGARA.html
National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse --- By Steve Jones
Published: 12:00PM BST 05 Oct 2010 --- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...-of-verse.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/a...reading/65215/ Article ...one of five installments by Adam Roberts from The Atlantic
THE NERVE FIBERS
The nerve fibers, a veil on red music clanging,
cannoned from columns. An anthem bubbling.
Scientifically stretching over the cheeks
at the edge of one moment. The grey suit passed,
the overcoat, impressions everywhere.
Watching a negligible dog fetch as if it were human—
his hind legs so honest, so independent—
she stood in a doorway, not beautiful, never
specially clever, remote from herself. Over and over—
twist, turn, wake up, set going. Doomed to sinking—
decorate the dungeon, be decent.
The edge of her mind turning meaning for hours
at a time. Hours and days. A sound like a sickle.
Her head a bunch of heather. Then over.
The matted and tangled message, a red square.
The thinking nerves. The door of the room.
Dante : the Inferno. The English : London.
A piston thumping mechanically behind the screen. ...{excerpt}
Last edited by quasimodo1; 11-01-2010 at 07:33 AM. Reason: http://bostonreview.net/BR35.5/bang.ph
from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" AN EGG IN THE CORNER OF ONE EYE --- I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teen-ager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my dath, leaking. In this way weeping resemmbles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.
NZ Poet Michael Harlow reciting his poem 'I am a Tyger':
http://www.ch9.co.nz/content/michael-harlow-0
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